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Friday, April 11, 2014

Windows 8.1 Update KB2919355 woes and my solution

Keywords: KB2919355, 0x80070005, 0x80073712, FAIL

On April 8, my Windows 8.1 64 bit desktop computer (16GB ram, 240GB Sandisk SSD boot drive) did the automatic Windows Update and I had to let it go overnight because of the size of the total update. When I got up I found that KB2919355 had failed with error 0x8007005. I tried it again and again. Same failure. But I had other stuff to do so I just did some research.

Next day I went to Microsoft support directly downloaded all the .msu update files associated with the April 8 patch set. I even downloaded the KB2919442 msu because it is a prerequisite. I spent the next two days trying to install KB2919355 manually and I kept getting a new error 80073712 which means there was corruption. By following other people's posts I was directed to use these in an administrator privs command prompt:
DISM /online /cleanup-image /restorehealth
DISM /online /cleanup-image /startcomponentcleanup
sfc /scannow

When they worked (not always successfully) I would try to install KB2919355 manually again and each time it failed. A number of tries...

Aside: in my research, I found in several places this statement:
These KB's must be installed in the following order: KB2919442, KB2919355, KB2932046, KB2937592, KB2938439, and KB2934018

Here is what I did to get it to work:
1. I backed up the system with Acronis True Image 2014. This turned out to be a very important step!
2. When to Control Panel/Recovery/Open System Restore and chose a Restore Point that was BEFORE the April 8 mess.
3. Did the System Restore.
4. Manually installed starting with KB2919355 msu in the order above. (KB2919442 was already there) I had each in Downloads and I simply double clicked to run them.
5. Each one required a reboot. Fortunately SSD reboot time is super fast.
6. Everything looked good EXCEPT the System Restore went to older versions of a number of source code files I had in Documents folder. Not good. So I examined each folder and decided to restore the whole thing from the Acronis backup. I also use Pegasus Mail and there was a PMAIL.INI file that got changed, but I was able to put it back correctly without using restore. I also found that 2 favorites were removed, but I was able to restore those with Acronis.

That worked. I am relatively happy, but quite concerned as to why System Restore removed some files I had created.

It is my belief that the order of the KB's being installed on April 8 was SUPER IMPORTANT and the automatic Windows Update didn't know that so it installed the others first, then tried to install KB2919355 out of order. Mostly because of my slow internet connection. The others were downloaded first so it installed them.